USTheater is devoted to plays, operas, and performances, American and international, performed and published in the United States. We also are open to new plays by playwrights.
All materials are copyrighted as noted. The blog is edited and much of it written by Douglas Messerli

Let
me begin by admitting to what some may see as sacrilegious: of Mozart’s major
operas, I least like his The Magic Flute.
To me both Don Giovanni and Cossi fan tutte, the latter almost a
variation of his last opera in its testing of faithfulness and love. With its
heavy Masonic iconography, its fantasy and fairy-tale silliness and
inconsistencies, and in its abstracted and often undeveloped characterizations,
The Magic Flute is more about the
idea of love and its challenges than actually a tale of two lovers willing to
suffer the trials and tribulations of physical and psychic attraction. The fact
that in this opera Mozart has so abstracted love, along with its comic book-like
and fantasy figures is obviously what makes this opera so attractive to
children—or, at least, to parents who would wish their children might grow to
love opera. The very fact that Tamino, chased by the dragon, falls in love with
a picture of Pamina, as opposed to a real being is what makes this tale a
voyage safe for the kids. Indeed, throughout the entire opera, the two lovers
hardly have more than a few moments together, kissing only at the end—an end
that represents, at least symbolically, a life after death—after all they have
been silenced, tempted, burned to ashes, and tied to the ocean floor
beforehand.

Even Papageno, the bird-catcher, who has a
far more course vision of love than his compatriots, doesn’t get to kiss his
Papagena until after both have been nearly consumed in an explosion—another
kind of after-life experience—that
renders his and her vision of a heavy-populated household as sexually neutered.
Papagena—at least in the LAOpera production I saw the other day—may be a highly
sexual flirt (she appears in the production I saw as a mix of a cabaret stripper
and a baton-twirling majorette), but by the time the couple gets down to their
chorus of “Pa’s,” they have quite literally been burned.

In short, Mozart and his librettist seem
completely disinterested in their characters’ motivations, interactions, or
even consistency. They are simply lovers who must undergo predetermined and
quite inexplicable trials and tribulations to prove their worthiness for one
another or evil monsters determined to get in the way. We easily comprehend why
Don Giovanni takes to the streets: he is a womanizer in search of yet more
lovers. We can well perceive why the braggarts Ferrando and Guglielmo want to
test their lovers’ faithfulness. But we have little idea why—particularly given the spider-like manifestation of Pamina’s
mother in the LAOpera production—Tanino has fallen in love or why, without
really knowing him, Pamina responds in kind, going so far as to attempt suicide
and, later, follow Tamino into the throes of death if not death itself. In
short, all of the Mozart’s characters in this opera seem to exist in a kind of
gap, are separate and isolate, never quite able to reach out to one another
until the highly spiritualized ending. And I think this isolation of the opera’s
figures also plays out in Mozart’s music as well. The dialogue passages which
separate the opera’s arias help to further isolate the opera’s set pieces, some
of which are obviously quite beautiful, but for me, at least, seldom coalesce.

Given the isolation of character and gaps
of logic and plot of The Magic Flute,
directors and designers generally fill the spaces with extraordinarily elaborate
costumes and fabulous fairy-tale like sets which enchant audiences young and
old and keep them from too carefully questioning and the why and where the
characters actions and travels in their attempt to enter the temples of
knowledge and wisdom. And in that sense, I have to admit, the LAOpera
production I saw, based on the remarkable Komische Oper Berlin production with direction by Suzanne Andrade and Barrie
Kosky and animations and concept by the two-person group 1927, consisting of
Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barrit, is definitely the most innovative version of
the Mozart opera in years.

Their brilliant blend of animation and
live-singers, discards the long dialogical interludes with something similar to
silent-film intertitles, often presented in the flourished letterings of the
first two decades of film-making, with the similarly outdated links of words
such as “meanwhile…” or “on the other hand,” etc. But, fortunately, that is
only the beginning of 1927’s involvement with animation. In this work, film is
not projected upon a backscreen or front scrim as in, say, the recent MET
production of The Nose but becomes
part of the on-stage action itself, using the singers to create links between
cartoon-like images borrowed from the entire history of cinema, from Westerns,
horror films, and science-fiction pictures and their images to figures that
might remind one of the paintings of Andy Warhol and Henry Darger. The
monstrous Monostatos (Rodell Rosel) becomes a kind of Nosferatu, to Papageno’s
(Rodion Pogossov) Buster Keaton. Pamina (Janai Brugger) is turned into a Louis
Brooks and Perils of Pauline figure, while Tanino (Lawrence Brownlee) is turned
into a sort of Harold Lloyd-like nerd. Birds fly across the stage, along with
pink elephants (clearly a reference to Disney’s Dumbo), monstrous legions of slightly
leashed dogs and the trotting and faithful bird-loving cat. The three boys who
accompany Tanino and Papageno into the underworld are transformed into
sweet-faced butterflies. When Tanino plays his magic flute, notes flutter
across the entire stage, and with Papageno opens his box of magic bells, a
whole chorus of young nymphets flutter about the proscenium as they were the
performers in a Busby Berkeley number.

If at moments this can move a little too
far in the director of Disney’s Fantasia,
the work’s evil figures call up images that seem to salute the convoluted mechanical
constructions of Monty Python and Gabe Ruberg. The terrifying aria wherein The
Queen of the Night orders her daughter to kill Sarastro (Evan Boyer) becomes a
horrifying series of images in which her spider claws turn suddenly into
daggers pinning Pamina into the prison of her will.

All of this energized image-making, in
short, creates an often exhilarating and nearly always entertaining subtext to
the opera’s music. The only problem is that in its stage-craft requirements
that the singers take their places on the entire screen both vertically and
horizontally of the stage, they are forced to stand upon small pedestals almost
as friezes or, in the case of the three boys and three ladies in framed
tableaus. Since they seldom can move through space, the actors seem even more separated
and isolate from one another, only reiterating the problem of Mozart’s work.
The brilliant interchanges between the “real” and the “imaginary,” moreover,
merely remind us that Mozart’s figures are emblems of beings—lovers and evil
forces—as opposed to psychological figures determined to explain and enact
those emotions.

As a lover of artifice, of course, this
does not truly trouble me. Mozart’s work, in this case, was never intended to
be a psychological exploration of why people fall in love or try to defeat its
forces. Leave that to somewhat like Bergman, whose The Magic Flute-influenced film I have previously described (see
above). Here love, the lovers’ willingness to suffer its torments, and the
knowledge that suffering rewards is as inexplicable as why Adam and Eve became
determined to eat the forbidden “apple” which expelled them from their own
magical lives.

Arrigo
Boito (libretto, based on Shakespeare’s The
Merry Wives of Windsor and King Henry
IV), Giuseppe Verdi (music) / the production I saw was a live H.D.
broadcast on December 14, 2013

As
numerous musicologists and, in an intermission interview with Peter Gelb, as
conductor James Levine and director Robert Carsen reiterated, it is amazing to think
that the great composer of 19th century tragedies should have chosen
as his last work to write this sparklingly antic comedy, paralleling indeed
Shakespeare’s own trajectory.

But it is also apparent that Verdi poured
all his musical experience into this work, creating, throughout, ensemble works
that literally shimmer with contrapuntal complexity, despite the rather
straight-forward—and, at times, inexplicable—plot. At the center of work,
obviously, is the mound of decayed flesh and quite filthy pig of a human being,
Falstaff (performed with brilliance by Ambrogio Maestri). While he once may
have been a slim man who dined with the King, in this work Old John, despite
his desire and intentions of moving forward, is tired and poor, living in an
outlandish mess of trays with left-over meals stacked with dishes and wine
glasses. His dress, his room in the Garter Inn, indeed, his life is a mess, as
he appears, at moments, to be sharing his huge bed with his two thieving
servants Bardolfo (Keith Jameson) and Pistola (Christian Van Horn), who are
nearly as physically disheveled as the rotund knight. Most importantly, the
corpulent continent of flesh has run out of money, desperately needed if he is
to continue celebrating the joys of life to which he has become accustomed. He
reveals his solution to the problem to his servants: he will seduce two local
Windsor wives, Alice Ford (Angela Meade) and Meg Page (Jennifer Johnson Cano),
who, although they are commoners, are wealthily married and control their
hubands’ coffers. He attempts to dispatch love letters to the women through
Bardolfo and Pistola that very morning. Although their refusal to do so, and
their sudden discovery of the word honor, is inexplicable, it sends the plot
forward, as he tosses them out and they turn to Alice Ford’s husband as a kind
of ridiculous revenge.

The rest of the opera might be described
as a kind of revenge comedy, as the outraged women and Alice’s husband attempt
to foil and punish the overweight knight’s ridiculous romances not once, but
twice. In each case, Mistress Quickly (the glorious Stephanie Blythe) acts as
go-between, seducing Falstaff into the belief that he truly has a chance to woo
the women.

In between these absurd romances, Verdi
and Boito insert the “real” romance between lovers Fenton (Paolo Fanale) and
Nannetta (Lisette Oropesa), the later the Fords’ daughter whom her father wants
to marry to the elderly Dr. Caius (Carlo Bosi). The merry wives, accordingly,
need not only to fool and punish Falstaff but Ford (Franco Vassallo) as well.

How they achieve their goals, of course,
is at the heart of the work’s antic comedy, involving the staples of farce,
including hiding out in closets, ducking under tables, and implanting the hero
within a huge, smelly laundry basket, as the entire ensemble rush about inn
various directions as if they were in a Mack Sennett comedy. The final act,
moreover, takes the action to a Shakespearean countryside where old wives’
tales and local folklore are combined with the whole town’s trickery to
convince Falstaff that he is being hounded by fairies, nymphs, and ghosts, and
to alter the intentions of Ford, allowing the ingénues to marry. As in Mozart’s
Cosí fan tutte, everything turns out
happily, even if in the madcap events, Bardolfo is also accidentally married to
Dr. Caius. After all, as Falstaff, once he realizes he has been made an ass of,
sings: “Everybody is fooled!”

Director Robert Carsen has quite
appropriately set his version of this wonderful opera in 1950s England, a time
of great upheaval in the English aristocracy, suddenly forced to sell their
castles and marry wealthy commoners. The very issues of Shakespeare’s day—the
radical changes in class and position—are quite nicely reiterated in brightly
flowered dresses and candy-colored kitchens of the post-War II England.

This production was notable, moreover,
not merely for the excellent performances of the entire cast, but the return to
the director’s podium of James Levine, out for a few years because of back
problems. Sitting at his stationary chair instead of joining the cast on stage,
Levine surely seemed to the Met audience that he was now one of them!

Despite all the on-stage revelry,
finally, there was something, as some critics pointed out, terribly melancholy
about this production, a revelation, perhaps, that Verdi’s final creation was
also a wistful representation of the end an era when such outsized lovers of
life were free to roam, celebrate, and devour life. As Falstaff fires back when
he discovers that he has been once more tricked, “I am not only the source of
wit, but the cause of it.” It is, after all, his outsized actions that have led
to the complex machinations in all the others. Asked by Renée Fleming, during
an intermission conversation, whether Falstaff actor Ambrogio Maestri (who has
performed the work more than 200 times) felt Falstaff’s comeuppance was
deserved, the rotund baritone answered, looking down upon his own girth and the
pasta he has just prepared, shot back, “No!” As he himself makes apparent
through his performance, how boring life would be without the world’s
Falstaffs.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

In
Rome, in the Costanzi Theatre, packed to capacity, while I was listening to the
orchestral performance of your overwhelming Futurist music, with my
Futurist friends, Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Soffici, Papini and
Cavacchioli, a new art came into my mind which only you can create, the Art of
Noises, the logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.

Ancient
life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the
machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the
sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in
muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not
intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as
earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent.

Amidst
this dearth of noises, the first sounds that man drew from a
pieced reed or streched string were regarded with amazement as new and
marvelous things. Primitive races attributed sound to the gods; it was
considered sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich the mystery
of their rites.

And
so was born the concept of sound as a thing in itself, distinct and independent
of life, and the result was music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real
one, an inviolatable and sacred world. It is easy to understand how such a
concept of music resulted inevitable in the hindering of its progress by
comparison with the other arts. The Greeks themselves, with their musical
theories calculated mathematically by Pythagoras and according to which only a
few consonant intervals could be used, limited the field of music considerably,
rendering harmony, of which they were unaware, impossible.

The
Middle Ages, with the development and modification of the Greek tetrachordal
system, with the Gregorian chant and popular songs, enriched the art of music,
but continued to consider sound in its development in time, a restricted
notion, but one which lasted many centuries, and which still can be found in
the Flemish contrapuntalists’ most complicated polyphonies.

The
chord did not exist, the development of the various parts was not subornated to
the chord that these parts put together could produce; the conception of the
parts was horizontal not vertical. The desire, search, and taste for a
simultaneous union of different sounds, that is for the chord (complex sound),
were gradually made manifest, passing from the consonant perfect chord with a
few passing dissonances, to the complicated and persistent dissonances that
characterize contemporary music.

At
first the art of music sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then
different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear
with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated,
strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way
we come ever closer to noise-sound.

This
musical evolution is paralleled by the multipication of machines, which
collaborate with man on every front. Not only in the roaring atmosphere of
major cities, but in the country too, which until yesterday was totally silent,
the machine today has created such a variety and rivalry of noises that pure
sound, in its exiguity and monotony, no longer arouses any feeling.

To
excite and exalt our sensibilities, music developed towards the most complex
polyphony and the maximum variety, seeking the most complicated successions of
dissonant chords and vaguely preparing the creation of musical noise. This
evolution towards “noise sound” was not possible before now. The ear of an
eighteenth-century man could never have endured the discordant intensity of
certain chords produced by our orchestras (whose members have trebled in number
since then). To our ears, on the other hand, they sound pleasant, since our
hearing has already been educated by modern life, so teeming with variegated
noises. But

our ears are not satisfied merely with this, and demand an
abundance of acoustic emotions.

On
the other hand, musical sound is too limited in its qualitative variety of
tones. The most complex orchestras boil down to four or five types of
instrument, varying in timber: instruments played by bow or plucking, by
blowing into metal or wood, and by percussion. And so modern music goes round
in this small circle, struggling in vain to create new ranges of tones.

This
limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of
“noise-sound” conquered.

Besides,
everyone will acknowledge that all musical sound carries with it a development
of sensations that are already familiar and exhausted, and which predispose the
listener to boredom in spite of the efforts of all the innovatory musicians. We
Futurists have deeply loved and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. For
many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and hearts. Now we are
satiated and we find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of
trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for
example, the “Eroica” or the “Pastoral”.

We
cannot see that enormous apparatus of force that the modern orchestra
represents without feeling the most profound and total disillusion at the
paltry acoustic results. Do you know of any sight more ridiculous than that of
twenty men furiously bent on the redoubling the mewing of a violin? All this
will naturally make the music-lovers scream, and will perhaps enliven the
sleepy atmosphere of concert halls. Let us now, as Futurists, enter one of
these hospitals for anaemic sounds. There: the first bar brings the boredom of
familiarity to your ear and anticipates the boredom of the bar to follow. Let
us relish, from bar to bar, two or three varieties of genuine boredom, waiting
all the while for the extraordinary sensation that never comes.

Meanwhile
a repugnant mixture is concocted from monotonous sensations and the idiotic
religious emotion of listeners buddhistically drunk with repeating for the nth
time their more or less snobbish or second-hand ecstasy.

Away!
Let us break out since we cannot much longer restrain our desire to create
finally a new musical reality, with a generous distribution of resonant slaps
in the face, discarding violins, pianos, double-basses and plaintive organs.
Let us break out!

It’s
no good objecting that noises are exclusively loud and disagreeable to the ear.

It
seems pointless to enumerate all the graceful and delicate noises that afford
pleasant sensations.

To
convince ourselves of the amazing variety of noises, it is enough to think of
the rumble of thunder, the whistle of the wind, the roar of a waterfall, the
gurgling of a brook, the rustling of leaves, the clatter of a trotting horse as
it draws into the distance, the lurching jolts of a cart on pavings, and of the
generous, solemn, white breathing of a nocturnal city; of all the noises made
by wild and domestic animals, and of all those that can be made by the mouth of
man without resorting to speaking or singing.

Let
us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes, and we
will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in
metal pipes, the grumbling of noises that breathe and pulse with indisputable
animality, the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl
of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips,
the flapping of curtains and flags. We enjoy creating mental orchestrations of
the crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and
shuffling of crowds, the variety of din, from stations, railways, iron
foundries, spinning wheels, printing works, electric power stations and
underground railways.

Nor
should the newest noises of modern war be forgotten. Recently, the poet
Marinetti, in a letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis, described to me with
marvelous free words the orchestra of a great battle:

We
want to attune and regulate this tremendous variety of noises harmonically and
rhythmically.

To
attune noises does not mean to detract from all their irregular movements and
vibrations in time and intensity, but rather to give gradation and tone to the
most strongly predominant of these vibrations.

Noise
in fact can be differentiated from sound only in so far as the vibrations which
produce it are confused and irregular, both in time and intensity.

Every
noise has a tone, and sometimes also a harmony that predominates over the body
of its irregular vibrations.

Now,
it is from this dominating characteristic tone that a practical possibility can
be derived for attuning it, that is to give a certain noise not merely one
tone, but a variety of tones, without losing its characteristic tone, by which
I mean the one which distinguishes it. In this way any noise obtained by a
rotating movement can offer an entire ascending or descending chromatic scale,
if the speed of the movement is increased or decreased.

Every
manifestation of our life is accompanied by noise. The noise, therefore, is
familiar to our ear, and has the power to conjure up life itself. Sound, alien
to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself, an occasional but
unnecessary element, has become to our ears what an overfamiliar face is to our
eyes. Noise, however, reaching us in a confused and irregular way from the
irregular confusion of our life, never entirely reveals itself to us, and keeps
innumerable surprises in reserve. We are therefore certain that by selecting,
coordinating and dominating all noises we will enrich men with a new and
unexpected sensual pleasure.

Although
it is characteristic of noise to recall us brutally to real life, the art of
noise must not limit itself to imitative reproduction. It will achieve its
most emotive power in the acoustic enjoyment, in its own right, that the
artist’s inspiration will extract from combined noises.